The Boston Area SharePoint Users Group (BASPUG) was founded to bring together like minds to network and share their experiences, triumphs, and tribulations around Microsoft SharePoint, to provide a community platform for Boston area SharePoint users, administrators, developers, architects, of all experience levels, even brand new to SharePoint, to share their knowledge with the community.

Geoff Varosky will be presenting “Easily Integrating a Chat Bot into SharePoint”

Session Abstract

​Chat Bots are very commonplace these days. They have been around for years, but advances in AI technology have allowed for a large growth and advances in this area. Microsoft has in preview a service called QnA Maker, that will allow you to create and build a Chat Bot that you can easily integrate into SharePoint using the Azure Bot Framework, all without writing a single line of code. Join me, and I’ll walk you through step-by-step on this process, along with discussing how and where Chat Bots can be used to provide better adoption and support to your users.

About the Speaker

​Geoff Varosky is a Senior Architect for BlueMetal, a division of Insight, based out of Watertown, MA. He has been architecting and developing web based applications his entire career, and has been working with SharePoint for the past 13 years. Geoff is an active member of the SharePoint community, Co-Founder and Co-Organizer of the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group, co-founder for the Boston Office 365 Users Group, co-organizer for SharePoint Saturday New England.

​Modern technology, craftsman quality. We’re an interactive design and technology architecture firm matching the most experienced consultants in the industry to the most challenging business and technical problems facing our clients. We seek to understand your business strategy and technical foundation to craft modern applications that holistically blend strategic vision, creative design, architecture, and innovation, to exactly meet your needs and ensure your success.​​

SUSTENANCE

Food and beverages will be provided at the meeting free of charge from our meeting sponsor. Food arrives at about 6PM. We generally have pizza (with and without meat), as well a salad, water, and sodas.​​

RAFFLE PRIZES

We will be handing out raffle tickets at the BASPUG meetings.

LOCATION

The meeting will be held at the BlueMetal Boston Office at 9 Galen St, Suite 300, Watertown, MA.​ Parking is FREE, and available in the main lot, and behind the building along the river.

Walk in the main building entrace (not the side of the bus stop), go to the back, take the elevator up to the 3rd floor, and the BlueMetal office is right in front of the elevator.

Runbooks are a feature of Azure Automation that allow you to execute workflows from within Azure or remotely to automate processes.

To give an example, lets say you have a script that monitors an Azure service every 5 minutes to see if it is running or not. The script, will test and see the status of an Azure App Service. If it tests the site, and does not get the HTTP 200/OK message, then it triggers an alert, creates a ticket, and now someone has to go recycle the Azure App Service. If this can happen frequently, then it is something you would look to automate.

In comes the Azure Automation Runbook. You create a PowerShell script that is hosted in Azure (a Runbook), and when your script detects that the service is not responding, it makes a call out to a URL, and the URL runs the Runbook, which restarts the Azure App Service. The monitoring script then runs again, sees that the service is back up, and the appropriate steps are taken.

This might seem like a lot of extra work, but, if you are, say, connecting in through a VPN to manage an Azure environment, it can be quite time consuming just to restart a service.

However, we are not using that as our working example in this article. That was just to give you an idea of the kinds of things that can be done using Runbooks. In this article, we will be showing you how to create a Runbook, and call it from SharePoint, using Microsoft Flow. It will not be a real exciting example either, but, it will show you how to do all this, so you can do more on your own!

Now, lets say we want to add some parameters to our script, so we can specify the input… and not have it statically set as just “http://www.google.com” as the site, and “Google Website” as the description. Let’s update the code with some parameters…

To get back to your code, click on Edit PowerShell Runbook in the breadcrumb navigation at the top

Update our code with the parameters $Site and $Description, and then Save, and then go back on over to the Test pane

You can now see we have two fields for Site and Description under Parameters. Fill those out…

And run the script again…

Looks good! Now… we can do this all day from within Azure… but remember way back to the start of this article, I mentioned calling this from Microsoft Flow from within SharePoint? To do that… we’re going to need to make a change to our script, as well as create a webhook.

First, lets change our script. You know how we just added parameters? Well, when calling a webhook, we’re going to be making a REST call to a URL. We cannot pass in parameters like we just did to the script. That is good for running within Azure itself… in order to pass parameters to our runbook via a webhook… we need to change the parameters. We will be passing in an object called WebhookData (or whatever else you want to call it). Which will be the JSON data sent along with the REST call. So, let’s update our code to this:

We will then parse out the Site and Description name/value pairs from that and pass it into our script from the $WebhookData object.

Before you can do anything with the SharePoint Patterns & Practices PowerShell library, you need to first connect to SharePoint Online. Sounds pretty basic, right? You need to establish who you are, and maintain your access during your session with the site you are working with.

When you do this… you are prompted for credentials… Every. Single. Time.

This is good for production, however, if you are developing a script, you may run this tens or hundreds of times… and, it gets old pretty fast. So, here is what I do. In my script, I set variables for the username and password (alternatively, you could pass these as parameters, and pass them along using a batch file).

Then, I convert the password into a secure string, and create a PSCredential object with the username and secure password.

I can then connect to SharePoint Online using the Connect-PnPOnline command (as shown above), wrapped in a try/catch block, and not be prompted for credentials!

Microsoft has a service in preview, called QnAMaker. It is a free (presently) service, which provides a REST and web-based service that trains AI to respond to questions asked of it. You’ve seen these on other sites, as these have become quite common, and ease the burden on support for SharePoint, or any other service out there. Chat bots can field common questions, freeing up time and energy spent on answering common asks.

They make it very easy to use – you can point it to a URL, type in your questions and answers, or upload a document (.docx, .doc, .pdf, .xlsx, and .tsv). The tricky part, is getting this from loading your knowledge base, to actually having a chat bot on your site. This is what this blog post is for, is to show you how to do it. They do have directions, but not a full walk-through on what to do.

QnA Maker Setup

First, go to http://qnamaker.ai, this is where you will get started. Click on Create New Service

Then sign in with a Microsoft ID, or organizational account like you would into Azure, Office365, Outlook.com, etc.

It will then ask you to provide permissions to QnAMaker, click Accept

Then you must agree to the terms and privacy statement, check the box and hit Continue

Enter in a name for your bot. I am choosing Testbot 9001

You now have 3 options for loading data into your Chat Bot…

From a URL that links to a resource which has a clear Q&A format, like a FAQ

From a file, in Question/Answer format (supported file types are .TSV*, .PDF, .DOC, .DOCX, and .XLSX format)*TSV stands for Tab Separated Values. Like a CSV, but, you know, with Tabs. You can do this in Excel.

Enter them in manually

For our Testbot 9001, we will be uploading from Excel. So, let’s create a new Excel file. In the first column, type in the question, or phrase, which the chatbot AI will hit on and use to provide the answer. Use the second column to provide that answer. Here is my example file:

Now, save the file. And go back to the QnA Maker setup, and choose Select file… next to the FILES section

and select the XLSX file from your local computer you just saved

Then scroll to the bottom and select Create

You will then see a dialog window appear while the service scans your file, and imports your Questions and Answers

Once complete, it will take you to the Testbot 9001 Knowledgebase.

Select Test from the side bar, and you can test the functionality with your questions

Cool, huh? The testing also allows you to train the bot as well. Such as choosing the best answer based upon what you had typed

Or providing multiple alternative phrasings, or synonyms

When done, click Save and Retrain to save your changes

You can see back in the main Knowledgebase, that it has been updated by what we asked and what we updated the suggestions and phrasings with

You can also add new Q & A pairs by clicking on Add new QnA pair

When done, Save & Retrain again to save your settings.

Once you are ready… click Publish

It will then show you what will be published… and then when ready, click Publish

The deployment confirmation screen will show you the example HTTP request for using your bot through the REST API. These are also available in the Settings link on the sidebar of the Knowledgebase.

We will need some f this information in a few minutes, so take down the Knowledgebase ID

Subscription: GeoffOpsChoose your own subscription. This one is mine. You can’t have it.

Resource Group: Testbot9001Use an existing or create a new one

Location: East USSelect the data center region you would like to use

Pricing Tier: FO (10K Premium Messages)This defaults to S1 Standard, change this to F0 Free. Or else you will pay for the service

App Name: Testbot9001

Bot template: Question and Answer

App service plan/Location: Testbot9001You will need to create a new one, or use an existing. For this example, I created a new one also in East US

Azure Storage: testbot9001a325I am letting Azure create a new one for me. This is a data storage account, like a fileshare. You can use an existing one if you have one as well.

Application Insights: OffThis is not free. So I turned it off.

Then click Create to bring life to your Azure Bot. I twill validate your choices, and then when complete, will begin deployment.

When deployment has completed, you can find the bot and associates Azure resources under the All Resources blade of the left, or, if you have other stuff in Azure, go to the Resource Groups blade, and click on your Resource Group we created in the Bot setup above. In my case, the Resource Group is Testbot9001

Ok. So, we’ve created our bot with QnA Maker, and created a Bot Service in Azure… now what? We need to connect the two.

Select your bot, it’ll be the one which has a TYPE of Web App Bot

On the left hand side, click on APP SERVICE SETTINGS > Application Settings

And then scroll down to App settings. You will see two blank settings called QnAKnowledgebaseId and QnASubscriptionKey

Now, remember those things we copied off earlier? Pate these in there.

And then click Save up top

Now, click on Test in Web Chat on the left side, and test out your new bot!

Pretty neat! But… now what?

Click on Channels on the left side. You will see Web Chat setup and running by default. You can also see, you can extend this out to Teams, Skype, and more pretty easily.

Click on Edit, and copy the Embed Code

And show one of the keys at the top

and replace the YOUR_SECRET_HERE in the embed code

And you can now drop that into a site, web part, whatever you’d like. It’s just an iFrame, so the possibilities are endless.

A simple example – using Embed Code on a SharePoint page:

Would I implement it like this for a client? Likely not… I’d be more apt to have a sliding pop-up window, similar to Facebook chats that can be minimized and maximized as needed. This was just an example to show how to build one of these.

Registration is now open for the Boston Area SharePoint User Group (BASPUG) taking place on May 10th, 2017, at the BlueMetal office at 9 Galen St, Suite #300, Watertown, MA​ from 6:30-8:30 PM. Click here to register!

Dimitri Ayrapetov will be presenting “How to Approach SharePoint Governance”

Session Abstract

​The term governance means different things to different people. There are many ways to define what governance means to your organization as you start on the journey of planning, implementing, and monitoring it. This session will provide the key fundamentals for approaching Governance in SharePoint with lessons from the field and practical best practices.​

About the Speaker

​Dimitri Ayrapetov is a Digital Partner with TrnDigital. He comes with over 10 years of consulting experience working with SharePoint, Office 365, and related technologies.

​Modern technology, craftsman quality. We’re an interactive design and technology architecture firm matching the most experienced consultants in the industry to the most challenging business and technical problems facing our clients. We seek to understand your business strategy and technical foundation to craft modern applications that holistically blend strategic vision, creative design, architecture, and innovation, to exactly meet your needs and ensure your success.​​

SUSTENANCE

Food and beverages will be provided at the meeting free of charge from our meeting sponsor. Food arrives at about 6PM. We generally have pizza (with and without meat), as well a salad, water, and sodas.​​

RAFFLE PRIZES

We will be handing out raffle tickets at the BASPUG meetings.

LOCATION

The meeting will be held at the BlueMetal Boston Office at 9 Galen St, Suite 300, Watertown, MA.​ Parking is FREE, and available in the main lot, and behind the building along the river.

Walk in the main building entrace (not the side of the bus stop), go to the back, take the elevator up to the 3rd floor, and the BlueMetal office is right in front of the elevator.

SharePoint Sig wrote a great post about creating an autocompleting textbox in Nintex Forms 2010 using a Drop-Down list as the source. This was awesome code that did not require much hassle to implement. Until version 1.11.4.0 was released in January of this year.

That is right, this threat that is on every Nintex release finally came to pass:

The changes did indeed require adjustments to custom JavaScript.

We had a client that this functionality broke on, so the SWAT team was called in to figure out a solution. After a few frustrating hours, I was able to figure it out. When configuring your variables that are linked to your textbox and drop-down list, let’s call them simply mylist and mytext for the drop-down list and textbox respectively… the ID for the drop-down list element had changed and added _hid on the end of it. So as an example, the ugly ID for the element:

That’s the first issue. The second issue is iterating through the options in the dropdown did no longer work. The original code used the following to iterate through:

$(dropDown1).children().each(function() {

This was no longer working in our implementation, so we did this:

Now, I tried several (well, a lot more than several) options to get ahold of the element, this seemed to be the only one that worked. I built up the element selector in a variable, and then passed it in:

var dropDownOptions = "#" + mylist + " > option";

NWF$(dropDownOptions).each(function() {

The final code ended up being close to this… this was the working prototype, so it can probably be cleaned up a bit more, but, the most important thing is that it worked (changed bits highlighted):

Registration is now open for the Boston Area SharePoint User Group (BASPUG) taking place on April 12th, 2017, at the Versatile office at 450 Donald Lynch Blvd., Suite B, Marlboro, MA​ from 7:00-8:30 PM. Click here to register!

Session Abstract

​This demo-heavy session is going to focus on showing you how to enhance your current business solutions using JavaScript & libraries such as DataTables, Google Charts, MomentJS, and more. Learn how to grab data from SharePoint Lists using the SharePoint REST API and display that information in a more meaningful way on the page.​

About the Speaker

Jared is a Solution Principal working for Slalom Consulting, a Microsoft Managed Partner providing national Business & IT solutions headquartered in Seattle, Washington. He is a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), and has over a decade of experience building technical solutions, and solving business problems. He is a regular speaker at user groups & SharePoint Saturdays all up and down the East Coast. Jared is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the Office Servers and Services category. He can be reached through his blog or on Twitter (@jaredmatfess).

At Versatile, we understand your IT solutions require careful consideration, whether you’re making traditional IT or cloud decisions. By focusing on clarity, simplicity, and support, we help you align your computing decisions with desired business outcomes. We take great pride in helping your organization run smoother, more efficiently, and more profitably by helping you find the right balance between traditional IT and cloud computing.

Versatile is more than our name – it’s who we are.​​​

SUSTENANCE

Food and beverages will be provided at the meeting free of charge from our meeting sponsor. We generally have pizza (with and without meat), as well a salad, water, and sodas. Beer and wine will also be available.​​

RAFFLE PRIZES

We will be handing out raffle tickets at the BASPUG meetings.

LOCATION

We will be meeting at the Versatile office at 450 Donald Lynch Blvd, Suite B, Marlboro, MA. Parking is free.

Registration is now open for the Boston Area SharePoint User Group (BASPUG) taking place on March 8th, 2017, at the BlueMetal office at 9 Galen St, Suite 300, Watertown, MA from 6:30-8:30 PM. Click here to register!

Session Abstract

​Since 2007, SharePoint has been billed as a platform for developing custom solutions. And who wants to be limited to just what’s in the box? The thing is, sometimes the customizations break when you upgrade SharePoint, which might be at any moment if you’re in SharePoint Online. Just ask anyone who used the "Fab 40" web templates and then couldn’t upgrade from SharePoint 2007! It’s gotten so crazy that some people just won’t customize SharePoint at all, even as new development technologies are introduced.

In this talk, we’ll review all the major options for customizing SharePoint since 2003, and the strengths and pitfalls of each. You’ll learn which options are "safe" and which are headed for a long trip down a short pier. This talk is for everyone who makes decisions about SharePoint – admins, business decision-makers, architects, and developers alike. You’ll learn what’s possible from each type of customization, and what the future has in store. The goal is to make it easy for you to navigate through all the options without stepping on any land mines!​

About the Speaker

Bob German is Principal Architect at BlueMetal Architects, where he leads SharePoint architecture and development engagements for enterprise customers. Bob has been developing on the SharePoint platform since it was called “Site Server”, and is a Microsoft MVP for Office Development and Office Services and Servers. Over the last few years, Bob has demonstrated "future-proof" client side solutions that allow code reuse from legacy SharePoint to the Add-in model and the forthcoming SharePoint Framework.

Prior to joining BlueMetal, Bob was an architect at the Microsoft Technology Center in Boston, MA; he also worked for Microsoft Consulting Services building and performance tuning web sites and other networking solutions.

DATE

Wednesday Mar 08, 2017.

TIME

6:30 PM – 8:30 PM.

LOCATION

The meeting will be held at the BlueMetal Boston Office at 9 Galen St, Suite 300, Watertown, MA.​ Parking is FREE, and available in the main lot, and behind the building along the river.

Walk in the main building entrance, go to the back, take the elevator up to the 3rd floor, and the BlueMetal office is right in front of the elevator.​​

Modern technology, craftsman quality. We’re an interactive design and technology architecture firm matching the most experienced consultants in the industry to the most challenging business and technical problems facing our clients. We seek to understand your business strategy and technical foundation to craft modern applications that holistically blend strategic vision, creative design, architecture, and innovation, to exactly meet your needs and ensure your success.​​

SUSTENANCE

Food and beverages will be provided at the meeting free of charge from our meeting sponsor. Food arrives at about 6:00. We generally have pizza (with and without meat), as well a salad, water, and sodas.​​

Sometimes the need arises to create separate Service Application Proxy groups in SharePoint. Starting with SharePoint 2010, you’ve been able to do this. In SharePoint 2007, you would have created different Shared Service Providers. Your needs might be, that you are exposing web applications to a different group of users, and need separate applications such as Search and the User Profile Service. This also allows you to run those service applications under different accounts, if you needed to for security reasons.

First, let’s create the proxy group we want to use. And lets give it a name.. in the example, I’ll be using "Redacted"… because all my screenshots have had the real service application group identity redacted 🙂 But you can name this anything you’d like. Load up the SharePoint Version Management Console… and call the New-SPServiceApplicationProxyGroup PowerShell cmdlet.

New-SPServiceApplicationProxyGroup "Redacted"

Once you have your new Service Application Proxy Group created, you can then change the web application subscriptions to the proxy groups. To do so, go into Central Administration > Application Management > Web Applications > Manage web applications and select one of your sites. In the ribbon, then select Service Connections under the Management group.

You can always verify this by then going into Central Administration > Application Management > Service Applications > Configure service application associations

Select the Web Applications view, and then you should see your sites, and their associated applications with their Application Proxy Groups.

When you create a new service application, by default, it is going to get tossed into the default group. There is no way in the UI presently to allow you to change associations in the UI once you have created your new proxy group, so, what you need to do is to handle this in PowerShell. The best way to get the IDs for your service applications is to use Get-SPServiceApplication, and then only display the two columns you need, DisplayName (so you know what ones you are looking for), and the Id.

Get-SPServiceApplication | select-object DisplayName,Id

Once you have the ID’s that you need for your Service Applications, you now need to add them as members to the new proxy group you created earlier. You can do this by using the Add-SPServiceApplicationProxyGroupMember PowerShell cmdlet, like so:

This will add the "Secure Store Service – Redacted" Service Application to my new proxy group Redacted.

If for some reason, one of the service applications do not want to move out of the default group after adding them into the new group, you can remove them with the Remove-SPServiceApplicationProxyGroupMember PowerShell cmdlet. Just an FYI – the default group is referenced as "", so, if you needed to now remove the above service from the default group, you will need to address it as: